A load control device may control the amount of power delivered to an electrical load. Load control devices include, for example, lighting control devices (such as wall-mounted dimmer switches and plug-in lamp dimmers), motor control devices (for motor loads), temperature control devices, motorized window treatments, and remote controls. Typically, a load control device may be coupled in a series electrical connection between an alternating-current (AC) power source and the electrical load to control the power delivered from the AC power source to the electrical load.
In some applications, the load control device may connect to a wireless network, such as a Wi-Fi network for example. Examples of Wi-Fi-enabled load control devices include those described in commonly-assigned U.S. application Ser. No. 13/538,555, filed Jun. 29, 2012, titled LOAD CONTROL DEVICE HAVING INTERNET CONNECTIVITY, the contents of which is hereby incorporated by reference herein in its entirety, for all purposes. In practice, such devices may connect to wireless network provided by a wireless network access point (AP), such as an AP provided by a home Wi-Fi router.
APs, and particularly home Wi-Fi routers, often have practical capacity limitations well below the theoretical protocol maximums. For example, a typical IP subnet might theoretically support 254 addressable devices. However, a home Wi-Fi router may only have internal memory sized to support 30 addressable devices. These practical limitations are often unnoticed, even by the most voracious Internet households. Having more than 30 Wi-Fi devices, computers, tablets, cell phones, on a household network at one time is uncommon. And, even in a commercial setting, wireless networks are routinely engineered with 10-30 users per router. The traffic generated by 10-30 commercial users often reaches the practical traffic capacity for the router.
But, it is not uncommon for a residential or commercial installation to have well over 30 load control devices. FIG. 1 offers a partial illustration of the modern residential technological environment 10. In FIG. 1, traditional network devices such as computers 18 and 46, tablets 36, smart phones 16 and 44, and printer 20, when few in number may be well served by a home Wi-Fi router 14. However, a home using Wi-Fi-enabled load control devices such as lighting load controls 12, 22, 24, 28, 32, 40, 42, and 50, motorized window treatments 26, 30, and 38, smart thermostats 34 and 48, and the like, may have a total number of devices vying for network access from the home Wi-Fi router 14 that may well exceed the router's capacity.